Since 9/11 there has been a lot of ranting from the left that America is well on the way to becoming a police state. According to this line of thought John Ashcroft and his evil minions are working overtime to smash all dissent and to deprive Americans of their civil liberties. Such near-great celebrities as Susan Sarandon have taken to the airwaves to announce, "We're living in lockdown."

What more evidence is required?

Countries earn the sordid title of "police state" because they have achieved a certain level of repression that ensures only the very brave or the very stupid ever will speak out against the government. Since Susan Sarandon decided to speak out while in England she cannot truly be considered brave, though it is much too early to rule out stupid.

If America is well down the road toward becoming a police state the proof of it should be all around us. Let's look at the evidence.

Number of New Yorkers attending October antiwar rally in Central Park: 15,000

Number of New York antiwar protestors arrested in October: 0

Number of times the antiwar (and anti-everything-else-American) Revolution Bookstore has been shut down: 0

Number of Revolution bookstore employees arrested for anti-Bush agitation: 0

Number of American-born individuals held without charges as enemy combatants: 2

Percentage of Americans held as enemy combatants: 0.0000000074 percent

Number of American-enemy combatants held without a lawyer or a judicial hearing: 0

What it takes to be held as an enemy combatant: planning to blow up a nuclear power plant or being found with a weapon fighting American soldiers

Number of newspapers shut down for dissenting with the government position on Iraq: 0

Number of commentators arrested for expressing a dissenting opinion: 0

Fate of most outspoken celebrities who are against current government policies:

Susan Sarandon: Still free, still rich, not yet blacklisted

Alec Baldwin: Still free, still rich, not yet blacklisted

Leo DiCaprio: Still free, still rich, not yet blacklisted

Barbara Streisand: Still free, still rich, not yet blacklisted

Number of people reported tortured by the Ashcroft Justice Department: 0

Number of times U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth says the Clinton-era Justice Department lied to obtain search warrants against American citizens: 75

Number of times Judge Lamberth says Achcroft's Justice Department has lied to obtain search warrants: 0

Number of U.S. municipalities suffering under martial law: 0

Most recent use of the military for police work inside the United States: assisting in the hunt for the D.C. sniper

Number of people arrested for anti-American activities since 9/11: 0(This number does not include the two noncombatants listed above.)

Number of congressman who on a visit to Iraq potentially committed treason by giving aid and comfort to the enemy: 2(Some would say three.)

Number of congressmen returning from Iraq who were arrested for treason: 0

Number of potentially treasonous congressmen who are running again for office: 2(Some would say three.)

Number of senators who voted against Iraqi Resolution: 31

Number of congressmen voting against the Iraqi Resolution: 133

Number of senators and congressmen arrested for not towing the line: 0

Percentage of network-news coverage that has been antiwar: 72 percent

Number of government-supported radio and television networks: 2(PBS and NPR)

Number of government-supported radio and television networks using the airwaves to support the government's position on Iraq: 0

Number of political prisoners arrested by the Ashcroft Justice Department: 0

Number of political prisoners held in U.S. jails: 4(most commonly listed)

Charges American political prisoners were convicted of:

Mumia Abu-Jamal: murder of a police officer

Leonard Peltier: murder of two FBI agents

Kathy Boudin: murder of two police officers

David Gilbert: murder of a guard while robbing a Brinks armored car

The cumulative evidence appears to indicate that we either are not in a police state or that John Ashcroft is the most inept secret policeman of all time. Some on the left would argue the latter. To appease them, I will give Mr. Ashcroft one more chance to enforce the principles inherent in a police state.

As of this moment, and for the rest of the week, I am calling for the nonviolent overthrow of the U.S. government (advocating the violent overthrow of the government actually is illegal). If this column fails to appear next week you can assume that storm troopers have dragged me off to Leavenworth. But, frankly, I think I would have a better chance of being arrested if I were to smoke a cigarette in a New York bar.

James Lacey is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and a New York-based columnist with expertise in finance and military affairs.TOPICS:Editorial; GovernmentKEYWORDS:Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.first1-50, 51-55nextlast

Thanks for the post. An interesting take on the matter. Of course, there is the opposing view on this matter, that the onset of tyranny is not like turning off a light switch, but instead is a long, gray, almost imperceptible twilight into darkness.

I happen to agree with you. I am more pissed off that there is a seat-belt law (which they are currently ratcheting up during the Thanksgiving Holidays for enforcement) than the government having the ability to monitor my spending habits and my emails.

Sure, it's an invasion of privacy and I should be concerned.....IF I WERE BREAKING THE LAW!

Until we weed out the possible terror cells living in our country due to inept enforcement of INS rules, we all have to understand that to ensure our safety, the government needs the ability to track suspects.

I AM NOT A SUSPECT and I will give them no reason to be concerned with me.

Until we weed out the possible terror cells living in our country due to inept enforcement of INS rules, we all have to understand that to ensure our safety, the government needs the ability to track suspects.

Great. So change the rules for aliens, both legal and illegal. If someone can prove they are a citizen, leave them alone.

How about posting the number of Americans who have had property seized in the WOD without ever having charges filed against them?

Besides, we have seen that GWB is an honorable man. What happens when we get another unprincipled person like clintoon in the Oval Office? You cannot grant power to a good and decent president without granting that same power to a hopelessly corrupt and evil president.

Sure, it's an invasion of privacy and I should be concerned.....IF I WERE BREAKING THE LAW!

Of course, once the government has the information, they can always change the law to make you a lawbreaker. Or they can just decide that since probable cause doesn't matter any more, neither does due process.

The trick is not to apply the brakes where you want this process to stop. The political momentum will carry it much further. The brakes need to be applied now, and quite possibly the vehicle will need to subsequently thrown into reverse.

The main concern I hear regarding the new powers granted the Justice Department are that they may someday be used by someone like Hillary. But to use them against innocent citizens, she would have to break the law in some fashion, which she would do anyway, as she has amply demonstrated by her past behavior. She would just be breaking DIFFERENT laws.

Or perhaps the concern is that the new laws make specious invasions of privacy more justifiable, under the linguistic cover of broadened Justice/Homeland Security powers. Is that the crux of the matter? I would really like to know if the sometimes brutal criticism I've seen at FR over this new legistlation is appropriate and warranted. I admit that I want President Bush and his administration to succeed, and that such desire may blind me somewhat to what is happening. But I also don't want to run around like a chicken with my head cut off, in an inchoate overreaction. Are there any good threads debating this stuff rationally?

Ya think police states just spring into existance fully-formed? Hardly. They develop over a period of decades, with one administration implementing more tools - always surrounded with warm fuzzy rhetoric - which the next administration abuses.

Remember the flap about Clinton obtaining 700 FBI files? Consider if he had 300,000,000 far more detailed files.
Remember all the rhetoric about how gun registration won't be abused? 50,000 AR-15 owners were recently tracked down and persuaded (under color of law) to hand them over, non-returnable, for "testing".
Remember how we have been assured all medical, credit, flight, tax, etc. records would be kept confidential to the intended use? Now we have the beginning of the Total Information Awareness Office, directed to gather and profile all such data.

Obviously we're not at a full police state yet. Nobody is seriously contending that (except a few fringers). HOWEVER, the path is clear, the methods are being put in place, the "everyone is violating something" laws are building up, and history repeatedly shows the consequences.

Sneer as you like, use carefully selected facts as you like, but do read history lest you repeat it.

Sure, it's an invasion of privacy and I should be concerned.....IF I WERE BREAKING THE LAW!

When's the last time you read the laws? How do you know you're not breaking any laws? Do you actually know what the law actually says, or are you just going on what a few ignorant people have told you?

I have read a portion of the NY penal law. It is terribly complicated, does not use words in normal ways, and requires a long time to understand properly. And it's surprising how many people violate it without knowing.

Not to bang my own drum, but I've read through a lot of the initial bill as passed by the House, and will re-read the entire bill starting tonight as signed by the president. A discussion of that exercise is here:

You are right about a lot of the claims being made about this bill - it's basically a large-scale administrative change with a couple of minor stinkers thrown in, as well as some potentially problematic vaguely defined powers and some beneficial aspects (Section 880, for example, kills off TIPS). Claims, for example, that this bill would allow forced vaccinations are hypothetical instead of being based on specific wording. Do we need to watch that process? Of course - but that's true of the transition of any law into the Federal Register.

Kind of like when the democr@p communists used the IRS to harass conservative organizations. The point of the matter is, the power and information in the wrong hands is never used in the benign manner that it is intended.

The point of having thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of laws, ever growing, is to grow a web big enough that *ANYONE* you disagree with or threatens your idealogy/ambitions - can 'catch' you, prosecute you - and persecute you.

I.e., Conservatives, "Hate-speech", Christians, etc.

If you believe the Word of God, which I do, then you see that inevitably the PC crowd takes over until the Lord comes back.

"You cannot grant power to a good and decent president without granting that same power to a hopelessly corrupt and evil president."

Exactly. Americans have far more to lose therefore have far more to protect. The rest of the world is either pitfully hopeless or at least moderately socialist. We would be too if the 'kooks' weren't constantly thinking out of the box. And who can quantatatively, based on the last century, demonstrate America hasn't already slid to a point of near-no return?

The more I here of the so-called 'kooks' and the concerns they raise, the more I seek to find if there is any validity.

For every handful of bogus or flawed contentions that the 'kooks' float, deeper research and investigation reveals a real danger to the American notion of individual liberty, national sovereignty and long term constitutional viability.

Good people rise to office to act positively and, conversely, bad people lust for power and attain it with disasterous results.

How many cotton-pickin' examples in history does one have to point to?

The arrogance of some to dismiss the dynamic, non-statist thinkers is the end of a society and will be the end of America.

From first hand experience, I can assure you that the two parties and their alphabetocracy have concocted, and in some cases attempted, numerous un-Constitutional, disastrous initiatives with, again in some cases, results very detrimental to the America that has thrived and now is in grave danger.

You are thinking along the correct lines. No, FISA and most post-9/11 changes do not herald a new police state. OTOH, it is completely good and rational for everyone to be on alert for their privacy. There has been much erosion of privacy and civil liberties BEFORE 9/11. Roll back that erosion, and people will be much more accepting of security-related changes in how much privacy they have. Does the gopvernment deserve to be criticised? Yes! Government is making the mistake of taking without giving any counter-balancing privacy back to citizens. With a small amount of effort, the storm over the Patriot Act could have been avaoided.

There are many citizens selling out their nation or attempting to destroy it. John Muhammed for one.

And had the cops actually used the database they created for the investigation, they would have nailed him by October 8th. And had the INS followed its own guidelines, Malvo would have been deported when he tried to enter this country as a stowaway.

We don't need to monitor citizens to this extent. Basic law enforcement and enforcement of existing immigration and visa rules would go a long way.

I wasn't speaking of Malvo. But Muhammed, Jose Padilla, Jihad Johnny are American citizens. There are thousands of other dangerous traitors in our midst.

And let's catch American citizens attempting terrorism while keeping existing liberties in place, by having the feds make better use of the existing data stream, instead of demanding more data when they can't handle what they're getting already. The 9/11 hijackers were foreign. Most of Al Queda is foreign. Let's keep more of an eye on them.

However, all the personal information about me that you just felt the need to display here in FreeRepublic...while embarrassing a bit, is not going to get be arrested for acitivites against the United States.

go to www.allewislive.com (better known as grandpa munster)and listen to his radio show everyday oh wait you cant the goverment had it shut it down before the office of homeland security officially existed

There are numerous FR threads addressing the situation. Not sure how many actually complied. The total number was far from trivial. Point is that once a perceived "terrorist" attack began, the information available (very inconvenient and limited, but still available) was substantially abused by the feds...how much bigger a problem when the TIA database makes such searches easy.

Yes, my post #20 was extremely uncool. The moderator's deletion and chastising is completely warranted. Pulling such detailed personal information together for display to unknown strangers is A Really Bad Thing. Such actions should be rapidly shut down, and the perpetrators (me, in this case) should be told in no uncertain terms to never try such a thing again.

Which is precisely my point about the Total Information Awareness program. The federal gov't wants to do the same thing in far more detail and for every person in the country. Such a system is extremely uncool times 300,000,000 precisely because of how such consolidated data can be abused, and comparable systems have indeed rapidly led to police states in the past.

Juxtaposition: I get severly chastized for pulling together a little publicly & easily available info on someone who openly states he has no problem with the gov't doing far more on everyone whether they like it or not.

Sure, I deserved it; does not the gov't deserve more so for doing the same on a far grander scale? DCPatriot, did you call the moderator in on post #20? if so, why shouldn't I do the same on the proposed Total Information Awareness system?

I have no problem with watching the Islamaniacs more closely but in other to do so there will be extra-ordinary measures required. Those measures are the ones you oppose. However, they will not greatly impose on law abiding citizens (or even non-citizens.)

there will be extra-ordinary measures required. Those measures are the ones you oppose. However, they will not greatly impose on law abiding citizens (or even non-citizens.)

Yeah, just like the income tax was only supposed to impact a small percentage of the highest-income taxpayers. Or the Social Security number was never going to be used for anything but Social Security. I could go on, but I think you understand why I have a hard time believing your assertion here...

They're only "Drama Queens" if the buck stops here, in terms of invading your privacy.

But when was the last time the Government didn't try and expand their power?

Government will always try and expand its power over the populace, as these privacy-killing measures prove. Who knows what a Democrat administration would do with a federal database/profiling system of every American? I don't want to find out.

The potential for future abuse, IMHO, is much greater than the benefits such measures are supposed to accrue. That just seems to be the way government programs go.

And I'm not necessarily talking about explicit programs -- think about the possible behind-the-scenese abuse bureaucrats could heap on citizens (like gun-owning citizens) with accesss to every facet of your personal history and federal profile... it's just a baaaad idea.

Except to you. You are a disaster just drooling to happen. Thanks for your reassurance, it's just what we need. John Ashcroft can do what ever he feels he must, YOU said it's OK. I guess our fears are groundless in the face of your reassurance, the track record of FedGov notwithstanding. Is that about the way of it, statist-boy? or girl? or whatever?

Somebody might post a link to an article archived here on FR titled "FEMA: THE DARK UNDERBELLY" if you want to see how such a police state might come about rapily and smoothly especially in light of a possible terror attack using WMD.

As I thought any guns turned in are likely to be not even 50 much less 50,000. Don't you guys ever get any facts right?
Any who turned them in after such a request don't deserve to have them anyway. They probably don't even know which end to point.

You are as much a statist, constitution-ignoring thug as justshutupandtakeit so what would be your point? That JimRob doesn't think the Constitution's being changed by the HSB? That's his opinion, which I respect. I think he's totally wrong but I respect him and his opinion. YOU, OTOH, I have zero respect for, as your every post is a paean to the joys of bigger and bigger government. Sorry, I ain't buying. And, in these days of Islam-o-nazis, I'd give SERIOUS thought to finding a new nick. I know you have declared Jihad on America's Constitution but your handle is rather suspect in the post 9-11 clime.

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